Mr. Aqua 6 Iwagumi

--Updated 10/1/14--

Fell in love with the dimensions of the Mr. Aqua bookshelf tanks and decided to grab one for myself. I told myself I wouldn't set it up until after I moved out of my parents place upon getting a job. That day has finally come and as a result I have finally set this tank up to the point that I am happy and settled with it. You'll see from some of the posts below that I had originally intended to do a pseudo dutch style tank but that has changed and I have instead decided to go with an Iwagumi style setup. I am very new at this so any input and criticism is greatly appreciated.

With my patience being the way it is I decided to flood my tank. I added my filter which is a Tom Aquarium Products Rapids Mini. It's a tiny filter and it has some immediately apparent down sides but once I got it where I wanted it set up the flow seems good (if not too strong for the future inhabitants. I decided to flood the tank because I heard that aquasoil substrates can leach some ammonia and I didn't want to have to worry about that happening down the line. As it stands right now I have only plants in the tank. They are downoi, dwarf baby tears, an unknown crypt, and glosso.

Here are some pics of the plants as they sit on day one of flooding.
Downoi
Baby Tears
Crypt
Glosso

Thanks for the suggestion. I currently have a paintball setup on my 20 gallon tank so what I plan on doing down the road is buying a larger (5#) tank and putting that on the 20 and then moving the paintball to this tank. That's going to be a bit down the road though since right now I'm just growing plants "for fun" before I really finalize and decide on a layout to pursue.

Speaking of planning the layout, I just posted this to the aquascaping forum, but I figured it makes sense to include in the journal as well.

I wanted to get people's opinion on if this layout would be possible or not.

I am planning to do a dutch layout with three tiers that gradually get larger from front to back. The foreground plants are my main concern

The layout is here

HC being dwarf baby tears, and UG being utricularia graminifolia.

I essentially want the baby tears to be the first "step" and then behind that the UG and then behind that the taller stem plants so it essentially steps up from 1 inch or so off the substrate to 3-5 when it gets to the UG with the stem plants arching across the back with the corners being around 6-7 inches tall and the middle plants being the full 9 inches (stem plants themselves being shorter, but height relative to bottom of tank).

Another question I had would be when/how to plant such that things grow in correctly without running over each other. I'm thinking it would be best to DSM the HC with some kind of divider in the tank keeping it confined to the semi-circular area. Does anyone have any experience with this idea or will everything shift and be ruined when I remove the divider?

Also ignore the stem plant selection as that has changed. Instead I am thinking of having a gradient/fade from red to green with plants with similar stem and leaf structure. I was planning on having a very deep red plant in the middle then either myrio tuberculum red or proserpinaca palustris immediately to either side, then next to that myrio mattogrossense so it fades from middle to each side going red to green.

Any tips, comments, or critiques are greatly appreciated as well as stem plant ideas that will help me achieve the look im going for.

Quick update. I decided that despite the fact that I was not going to plant this tank yet in a way one would consider to be an aquascape, I still want to use it to separate out my shrimp. In my other tank I have a bunch of red rili shrimp that are beginning to breed so I figured that before that happened I could separate some of my non rili shrimp or nicer cherries to have them breed separately.

Here is what they look like taken from my phone camera. There will also be some pictures of the plants which are right now just tossed in wherever there is real estate.

It's been about a week since I last updated so I figured I'd add a few pics. No new plants as of yet, but I am in the process of acquiring some UG which you can see above I plan to use to carpet most of the tank. In the mean time, here are some new pics of my shrimp that will be inhabiting this tank. I took out the cherries and have replaced them with the final inhabitants (for now), some RCS and yellow neos. The close up pictures were taken with my phone using a $6 magnetic macro lens which for the money I am pretty content with.

So it's been a while since I've updated basically because nothing has been happening. I had a huge huge huge hair algae outbreak so I relocated my shrimp temporarily then completely cleaned the tank. The issue was that I had the tank in a window which got sunlight from sunrise until about 4pm. This in addition to my light was obviously too much light and thus, hair algae. I am currently trying to grow some UG that I received emersed as I heard it grows quicker this way. Since I am in no rush to officially set this tank up as current job prospects number 0 I am just using it as a grow tank for a few plants that I may use in the future or in other tanks.

With having moved out recently I decided to focus my efforts on this tank a bit more. To that end I have fully scaped the tank as well as planted it with what I believe will be the final plant list as seen in the first, recently updated, post. The tank is a bit messy from feeding and moving a few things, but this is where it stands at day 1 with no background on it yet.

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